Even More of the New Normal
December 31st, 2012 - 1:14 pm
More on ObamaCare vs Jobs:
About a quarter of businesses surveyed by consulting firm Mercer don’t offer health coverage to employees who work at least 30 hours a week. Half of them plan to make changes so fewer employees work that many hours.
The health care law will particularly affect companies with 40 to 45 workers that plan to expand and hire. Many are holding off so they don’t cross the 50-employee threshold, says Christine Ippolito, principal at Compass Workforce Solutions, a human resource consulting firm in Melville, N.Y.
Keeping small businesses small is what got Big Business on board with ObamaCare.
Does 50 employee threshold get crossed if company A, with 40 workers, creates a wholly owned subsidiary with 20 workers?
Or what if employees are “hired” as 1099s? When you throw rocks in the stream to block it the water somehow manages to get around them.
No, wholly-owned subsidiaries apparently do not count, but regulations change, y’know?
1099 employees are another dodge, but those contracts have to be carefully managed to avoid IRS scrutiny. It’s possible to avoid this, but it’s probably cheaper to just pay the penalty for not providing insurance. That’s probably intentional–Obamacare is just one big, inefficient, job-killing tax.
Years ago, I read an article by a historian who believed that the year ending in “3″ in any decade was a kind of pivotal year, one that set the stage for what the next 10 years held. For example, 1963 was that sort of a year – the Civil Rights and protest movements gathered steam, JFK was assassinated, etc. You could say that 1963 basically was the beginning of the decade we now call “The Sixties.” If you look at other “3″ years, the pattern holds, some decades better than others.
I think 2013 is gonna be one of those years. The groundwork was laid in the first 4 years of Obama and now the sh*t is gonna hit the fan. ObamaCare will play a big part of it but the Arab Spring may be set to uncoil, big time, as well. “Bush’s fault” will no longer make it as an excuse. It’s all Obama now.
That 50 employee threshold is not carved in stone. Any law passed by Congress can be changed by Congress. Don’t be surprised when it’s revised down, in the name of “fairness” of course.